Chapter Text
The narrator reports, for the sake of accuracy, what happened on the rooftop of the hotel at the end of Day 1 of the Bangkok Literary Festival.
At the precise moment Lorena Lalina Schuett looked away from Miu Natsha Taechamongkalapiwat, Miu looked up from her conversation. Found Lena across the roof without any visible searching, in the manner of someone who had already known where to look.
It held for one beat. The length of time it takes to confirm something you had not been entirely certain of until now.
Then looked away.
Lena, who had already decided exactly what kind of person Miu was, did not see it.
Lorena Lalina Schuett, by her own account, was not someone who was impressed by the rich. She probably should be. She was also, as a related matter, not particularly interested in impressing them. Which was the more inconvenient of the two, professionally speaking.
It was therefore unfortunate timing that this year's literary festival coincided with the return of Miu Natsha Taechamongkalapiwat to Bangkok, after two years in London doing whatever heiresses did in London.
The industry, critics, editors, agents, publicists, and at least three novelists who pretended to be above this sort of thing, collectively decided that her homecoming was the most interesting thing to happen to the scene in recent memory. The festival organisers had not explicitly listed her on the programme. They had not needed to.
Lena learned all of this from P’Non, who told her about it on the expressway. Shared in the particular tone he used when he was delivering information he believed she would resist and had therefore chosen to deliver in a moving vehicle where her options were limited.
"She's been in London," P’Non said, navigating the expressway with the confidence of a man who trusted the universe to accommodate him.
"Two years. MBA, or something adjacent to an MBA. She's back now. In charge and on the board."
"I know who she is."
"You do? No, you don’t. I'm giving you context."
"You're giving me gossip."
"But also relevant industry context," P’Non said, with the dignity of a man who had been having this argument for six years and fully intended to keep having it.
"Which, I will remind you, is my job. I am doing said job wonderfully. In my car. On a Saturday morning."
"You love Saturdays."
"I love Saturdays that don't start at seven-thirty."
Lena looked out of the window at the expressway traffic sliding past in the heat, the city arranged under a pale late morning sky that suggested the afternoon was going to be unpleasant. She was not making a face. She was allowing her features to rest in their natural configuration. The face that P’Non objected to at industry events. The face which she had always maintained was not the same thing as making a face. The distinction was important.
P’Non reached over without looking and turned the air conditioning down by two degrees.
She had not said she was warm. Though she was, in fact, slightly warm. She said nothing, and he said nothing, and this exchange was representative of an arrangement that had been working for six years and showed no signs of breaking down.
"The important thing, N’Lena," Non continued, merging into the right lane, "is just to be aware of the room today. More than usual."
"I'm always aware of the room."
"You're aware of the parts of the room you find interesting. That's not the same thing."
Lena considered this.
It was the truth and a fair distinction.
"I'll be perfectly pleasant," she said.
Non's expression, visible in the rearview mirror for exactly one second, suggested that he was going to hold her to that.
The Bangkok Literary Festival was held in a convention centre hall connected to a hotel. Literary festivals always occupy their venues the same way. Reluctantly, on the building's part. With great enthusiasm on everyone else's.
There were banners. There were lanyards, colour-coded by category in a system that had seemed logical to whoever designed it and which nobody had successfully decoded in years of attending. There were stations dispensing coffee in cups printed with the names of publishers who had sponsored the coffee in exchange for having their names on the cups. The kind of arrangement Lena found it difficult not to think about each time she used one.
Non collected their lanyards from the registration table and handed Lena hers in one motion without breaking stride, the way he handled most of the small logistics her professional life required.
She put it on without fuss.
They moved into the main hall, which was already at three-quarters capacity despite the first panel being forty minutes away.
This was the thing about literary festivals that Lena found most instructive. The panels were rarely the point. The panels were the official programme. The actual programme was everything around them, the coffee queues and the hallway conversations and the careful social mathematics of who was seen standing next to whom and for how long and whether they looked pleased about it.
The people who claimed to attend for the ideas were, in Lena's experience, here for precisely the same reason as everyone else. They were simply more committed to not admitting it.
Hence the circus.
She was very good at the panels. She was considerably less interested in everything else. A position she maintained with the calmness of someone who had accepted, some years ago, that this made her difficult to manage and had decided that was the industry's problem. And P’Non’s.
Non, for his part, had long accepted this too, which was why he was already three paces ahead. Already scanning the room with the bright professional attention of a man who found all of it genuinely interesting. Lena followed in his strides with something she would not have called relief but which functioned similarly.
"Khun Arthit is here from the Siam Review," Non said, without turning around. "P'Wan has moved to Meridian, she'll be worth saying hello to. Beam from the festival committee is somewhere, we should find Beam."
"You should find Beam," Lena said. "I'll be at the coffee."
"You'll be at the coffee for twenty minutes and then I'll find you there and you'll look at me like I've interrupted something important."
"I don't do that."
"N’Lena." He stopped and turned, deploying the expression of someone who had photographic evidence and had chosen, on this occasion, to be merciful about it.
"I'm going to say hello to Beam. Come with me, be perfectly pleasant for five minutes, and then you can have the coffee and I will bring you something to eat and we will pretend this is how you wanted to spend your Saturday."
She looked at him. He looked back.
He had dark circles under his eyes that suggested he had been on the phone with someone difficult last night, and she was nearly certain that the someone difficult had been connected to her in some way she hadn't been told about yet. His lanyard was slightly crooked. He was already pulling up LINE to contact Beam in order to locate her in the crowd.
"Four minutes," Lena said. "Not five."
Non smiled the smile of someone who had won and was gracious about it. "That's all I ask," he said, and steered them toward Beam.
The second book hadn’t been moving. For ten months.
Lena didn't think about this at literary festivals, as a rule.
She thought about it everywhere else: at her desk, in bookshops, occasionally in the shower, because some problems won't resolve and won't leave but have apparently decided to stay anyway.
At festivals she maintained a clean internal partition between herself as a person with a problem and herself as a writer with a professional reputation. The two things did not need to occupy the same room.
The first book had been good. She knew this not because of the prize longlists, though there had been those. Not because of the review Non had screenshot and sent at 7AM with excessive exclamation marks she'd privately reread four times.
She knew because she'd gone back to it herself six months after publication and it had held up.
Honest and strange and specific in the way she had intended. She was proud of it in the way she was proud of most things, quietly and without particular interest in discussing it in public.
The small press that had published it folded eight months later. This was not unusual, and not her fault, and had been received by the industry with the sympathetic attention it reserved for these occasions. Which was approximately one week of that's a shame before the next thing arrived and displaced it.
Lena had moved on practically. The rights had reverted. Non had sent letters. The second book would find a home when it was ready.
The second book, however, was not close to ready.
She had a character she could not crack. Someone self-contained, private in a way that read from the outside as cold, a person whose interiority she could describe accurately from every angle except from within. She had an opening. Three pages, and they were right. The problem was everything after them. She had tried approaching the character from different directions, different moments, different tonal registers, and each time arrived at the same place: the end of the third page, and nothing beyond it.
A shape she could draw precisely but could not get inside.
On her bedside table at home was her copy of Pride and Prejudice. She had been rereading it in the evenings, not because it was relevant to the second book in any direct sense, but because there was a comfort in reading something completed when her own work felt most arrested.
Proof, she supposed, that it was possible to finish things. That the door existed even when she could not find the handle.
The narrator notes that this is a reasonable way to think about reading Pride and Prejudice, and also not the only way, and declines to elaborate further at this time.
***
LingLing found her at the coffee station at half past ten, which was the most predictable place to find either of them at any industry event that had a coffee station.
"You came," LingLing said.
"Non drove."
"That's not the same thing."
"It has the same outcome."
LingLing considered this with the poise of someone who had known Lena long enough to understand the distinction she was drawing and also long enough to know when to let it go. She poured herself a coffee and stood beside Lena and looked out at the hall with the easy silence of two people who had stood next to each other at enough of these things to require no performance between them.
They had met before either of them had been doing what they were now doing, in the overlapping edges of university and early career events, in the years when the industry had seemed larger and stranger and more possible than it currently did on a Saturday morning in a convention centre.
LingLing had been at the small press too, briefly, before it folded and she had moved to her current independent house with the pragmatic efficiency she brought to most professional decisions.
There was an unspoken understanding between them, that the second book would find its way back to LingLing's hands when it found its way anywhere at all. P’Non knew about this arrangement. He agreed in principle and was nervous about it in practice, which was a fairly accurate summary of his relationship to most things Lena did.
"How was the drive?" LingLing asked.
"Non spent it telling me about the heiress' return."
"When did he start?"
"He was kind enough to wait until we were moving."
LingLing nodded, unsurprised. "He told me he was going to do that." A pause. "And?"
"And I told him I was aware of who she was and would be perfectly pleasant."
"And he believed you."
"He has to," Lena said. "It's professionally inconvenient for him not to."
LingLing made a sound that was not quite a laugh and looked into her coffee. It was the expression she wore when she had something to say and was deciding on the correct order in which to say it.
Lena knew this expression. She had catalogued it over many years. She had learned that waiting was more efficient than prompting.
"I heard she'll be here for all three days," LingLing said, after a moment. "Not on any panels. Just present.” In the way that certain people are present at things was left unsaid.
"Yes, I was informed."
"Their company is doing something tomorrow night. Invitation only. Forty people, maybe." A careful pause. "Non wants you there."
"Of course he does."
"Lena."
"I will be," Lena said, for the third time today by her count, "perfectly pleasant."
LingLing looked at her with the expression that meant she was filing something away for a later conversation that Lena was not going to enjoy. Lena found this expression irritating for precisely the reason that it was always, eventually, justified.
The morning panel was on literary fiction in the age of social media. The kind of topic that generated significant heat and very little resolution. All five panelists had the energy of people who were ready to debate this indefinitely and had simply refined their positions.
Lena was not on this panel. She was on the afternoon one, on translation, which she found more interesting and considerably less performed.
She took a seat in the third row with her notebook open and made the notes she always made at these things, not because she expected to read them later but because the act of writing helped her think. And she was trying to think about the second book's second chapter, which had been the same four pages for two months and showed no sign of becoming five.
The character was the problem. She knew what the character needed structurally. She knew what function they served in the larger architecture of the book, what they wanted, why they couldn't say so, how they would move through the scenes she had planned.
She did not, despite knowing all of this, know them.
They remained on the page as a precise and accurate outline. Privacy was the problem. She could not access someone who would not be accessed. She wrote in the margin of her notes: what does she want that she won't name even to herself. Looked at it. Underlined it. Looked at it again. Crossed it out.
The panelist on the far left was making a point about readership data. The one beside him was visibly preparing to dismantle it. The audience was rapt in the particular way of audiences who enjoy watching two people disagree politely in public.
Lena closed her notebook and waited for lunch.
The midday break distributed the crowd into the hallways, the courtyard, and the hotel restaurant. The restaurant had arranged a lunch spread that people circled with plates while conducting the conversations they had actually come to have. The food was largely incidental.
The courtyard was warm and bright with the particular Bangkok afternoon quality that settled on the shoulders in a friendly and relentless way.
Lena found a position near the low wall that gave her a reasonable sightline across the space without placing her in the centre of it.
Non appeared within three minutes, which was faster than usual, carrying a small plate of things he set on the ledge beside her without announcement.
"You didn't eat," he said.
"I was about to."
"You were going to think about eating and then get distracted by something and then tell me you weren't hungry." He straightened his lanyard, which had gone crooked again at some point during the morning. "The afternoon panel is at two. You have forty minutes."
She ate something. He was already scanning the room with the contented attention of someone who found all of it genuinely engaging, which remained, after six years, one of the things about Non that Lena found both baffling and quietly useful.
"Beam asked me," he said, watching the crowd. "The imprint event tomorrow is confirmed for 9 PM. They want an answer by end of today."
"And I’m sure you said we'd let them know."
"No, I said you'd consider it."
"P’Non."
"It's a small-ish room. Interesting list this year." He picked something from the plate with the calm of someone who had already decided the shape of this conversation and was simply waiting for it to arrive at the conclusion.
"You would like the books. Maybe even the people."
Lena looked at him. He was not wrong, which was the most professionally inconvenient thing about Non. He was almost never wrong about what she would actually like, which made it very difficult to dismiss his recommendations on principle without looking, at least privately, somewhat foolish.
"I'll think about it," she said.
Non's expression indicated that he was filing this as a yes. She was going to let him, she decided. Just for today.
By late afternoon, the crowd had moved to the rooftop.
Lena scanned the room the way she always scanned rooms at these things. Cataloguing who was present, who was talking to whom, the social geometry of a Saturday afternoon, whether anyone she was obligated to greet was within greeting distance.
LingLing was across the roof in conversation with someone Lena didn't recognise, both of them leaning slightly forward with the body language of an exchange that had moved well past pleasantries.
P'Wan from Meridian was near the entrance with two people from a distributor, all three of them radiating the particular energy of a meeting that had been scheduled to happen here rather than in an office.
Beam, having apparently discharged her obligations for now, was working her way through the room with the practiced efficiency of someone hosting a three-day event.
At the far end of the rooftop, near the arrangement of potted plants the hotel had deployed with the confidence of an establishment that believed this constituted a garden, a group had formed with the quiet circling quality that groups form around someone the room has already made a collective decision about.
Lena looked, in the way you look at anything you have been briefed on before encountering in person.
Miu Natsha Taechamongkalapiwat was not doing anything remarkable.
She was listening to someone, her attention on the person speaking with a quality of focus that Lena noted despite herself. Rooms like this one reliably produced a specific kind of eye contact. The person you were talking to scanning over your shoulder for someone more useful. Miu was not doing that. She was simply listening. Once, briefly, she said something to the person beside her. The tone carried across the small distance even when the words did not.
Her champagne glass was held with the looseness of someone for whom holding a glass at an industry event was neither an occasion nor an effort.
In her other hand, stacked together with the unself-conscious ease of someone for whom this was simply how phones were carried, were two phones. Not one. Two. Both dark-screened, neither apparently requiring attention. Her bag was on her shoulder, dark Chanel, structured, the kind of thing that communicated a great deal without appearing to try. She was dressed with the particular ease of someone who had not needed to think about it, which was either effortless or the most elaborate performance in the room, and Lena, who had thought about it, found this distinction annoying.
She looked, taking it all in, like someone who had arrived at the festival with the intention of reserving judgment on it and had not yet encountered sufficient reason to revise that position.
She observed the two phones. She filed this under: unnecessarily complicated logistics. She noted the bag’s brand, and the champagne held with that particular ease, and the quality of the listening, and the way the group around her had arranged itself without anyone appearing to have arranged it.
She formed her assessment in the way she always formed assessments. Quickly, from available evidence, with the confidence of someone who had been right often enough not to question the method. The heir was composed. Aware of the room without engaging it. A private individual, who had never needed to make an effort and had therefore developed, through years of disuse, no capacity for it.
The coldness that came not from temperament but from a life arranged to require very little of you.
The assessment took under forty-five seconds, approximately.
She looked away.
The narrator reports, for the sake of accuracy, that at the precise moment Lena looked away, Miu Natsha Taechamongkalapiwat looked up from her conversation.
Found Lena across the roof without any visible searching, in the manner of someone who had already known where to look.
Held her gaze for one beat. The length of time it takes to confirm something you had not been entirely certain of until now.
Then looked away.
Lena, who had already decided exactly what kind of person Miu Natsha Taechamongkalapiwat was, did not see it.